The Screwtape Letters

“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle . . . There is wishful thinking in hell as well as on earth.”

Screwtape, an experienced senior devil, sees mankind through the distorted lens of his mission: to tempt souls to sin and damnation. He always sees the shadow side and mostly ignores the human potential for virtue.

“By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result . . . you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it ‘real life’ and don’t let him ask what he means by ‘real.’”

Here, Screwtape contrasts human reasoning that can investigate life from a philosophical point of view that is conducive to think of spiritual matters with the everyday stream of sensory experiences that keep a person tied to the body. The devils have a much better chance to tempt someone who is preoccupied with his or her material reality.

“Thanks to processes which we set at work in them centuries ago, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. Keep pressing home on him the ordinariness of things.”

God’s essence and God’s plan for human beings always involves mystery—there are parts of spiritual reality that are beyond human understanding. The devils do not want people to think about these mysterious elements. They much prefer that people focus on the obvious questions like, what are we having for lunch?